Tuesday, May 30, 2017

Traffic is in a mess not just on Indian roads. Its skies too, it seems, have become chaotic with the country’s aviation infrastructure inadequate to cope with growth in air traffic.
The result is a sharp increase in near misses or air proxes — in aviation parlance, it is when aircraft are separated by less than 1,000 feet vertically and 30,000-150,000 feet horizontally, in effect just a few seconds apart. Data from the aviation regulator show a 28 per cent increase in such incidents in 2016 from a year earlier.
In 2016, total traffic grew 14 per cent over 2015. Industry analysts blame saturating capacity across key airports for most of the cases where aircraft come dangerously close. While the airport in Mumbai is operating at full capacity, it is chock-a-block in Delhi during peak hours:
29/05/17 Mihir Mishra/Economic Times